Meet the Phone by Mako. It's a simple, do it yourself phone that teaches you how cellphones work. It comes in a premium, hand-crafted wooden box, with a hand-crafted wooden housing. The phone is powered by the Adafruit Feather FONA, which is an Arduino with a cellular card. The kit also includes a keypad to type in phone numbers, and a 2500mAh battery to last a good long while.
Our mission is to teach people how everyday electronics work by having them build their own version of a device. In the kit, people learn how phones work, how keypads work, and how to code in the Arduino programming language.
The code can be found in the file MakoSystem.ino, and you can upload, edit, or hack the code as much as you want! If you add a new feature to your Phone by Mako, add a file in the Features folder.
First, install the Arduino IDE from https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software. Download and install the Arduino file for your operating system. Download the file MakoSystem.ino above, and open the Arduino IDE. In the IDE, click File>Open, and open the code for MakoSystem.ino. If prompted, move into a subfolder.
To install the library for the Adafruit Feather FONA, go to File>Preferences, and where it says Additional Boards Manager URLs, type the following URL: https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json. Also, download the U8glib_Arduino-master.zip.zip and Keypad.zip files from the Libraries folder above. Move these files into your documents folder, and into a folder titled Arduino. Inside, there should be a folder called Libraries. Put these files there and unzip them. Back in the Arduino IDE, click on Sketch>Include Libraries>Manage Libraries. Search for FONA and install the latest version of the Adafruit FONA Library.
To upload code, press Tools>Board and make sure Adafruit Feather 32u4 is selected. Tools>Programmer should be set to USBtinyISP. Finally, the port in Tools>Port shouldn't be blank. Choose whichever option is available. To complete the upload, click Sketch>Upload and the code should start running on your Phone by Mako! If it doesn't, you can contact [email protected].